In the original dust cover. Brown cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. Hardcover. Condition: Great. Dust Jacket Condition: Great. 1st Edition. A collection of a stunning array of beautiful working horses, drawn and painted in colour, many years ago, by the man who knew them. For the lover of Victorian farming this book has inbuilt love.

This book is a wonderful portrait of rural England before mechanisation. George Soper’s skilful paintings,sketches,etc really bring to life the day to day toil of the working horse and his master. Paul Heiney’s text is a gentle and sympathetic commentary, which helps build the bigger rural picture around the paintings. You feel transported back to a time when life was tougher on the horses and men, but gentler on the environment.

George Soper RE (1870–1942) was an English illustrator and etcher whose work appears in books, magazines and journals, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Water Babies, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Arabian Nights and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Soper is best known for his images from the late nineteenth century onwards that depict rural life in Britain. He was selected to exhibit at the Royal Academy when just 19, and continued to exhibit there most years for the rest of his life.

George Soper was born on 2 May 1870 in South Hornsey, Middlesex and attended a boarding school in Ramsgate. Although Soper had little or no formal training as an artist he began working as an illustrator in Ramsgate, where he became friends with Frank Short, a civil engineer and member of South Kensington School of Art. Short recognised Soper’s ability and tutored him from 1902 onwards. Soper quickly developed a reputation as an expert artist and printmaker, and began illustrating for books and magazines. By the 1920s, he had developed a recognisable and varied set of skills covering watercolours, wood cutting, engraving, etching and drypoint and had dedicated his art to capturing the lives of manual workers, including farmers, fisherman and shepherds. He realised that this way of life was slowly disappearing, to be replaced by mechanisation and other technology or trades.

Paul Heiney (born Paul Wisniewski, 20 April 1949) is a British radio broadcaster and television reporter. He is perhaps best known as a former presenter of That’s Life! In 1990, Heiney took up traditional farming in Westleton, Suffolk where he lives with his wife Libby Purves. The couple have a daughter. For ten years Heiney worked 36 acres (15 ha) with Suffolk Punch horses. He wrote a diary of his activities for The Times as well as several books. He also presented two videos about farming with horses, Harnessed to the Plough and First Steps to the Furrow. Heiney had agreed with his wife that they should have the farm for no more than ten years. After the farm’s sale Heiney tried to make more time for his other great passion, sailing. He has also presented A Victorian Summer for Anglia Television, eight half-hour programmes about traditional farming: the glory of working the land with horses as well as the rigours and difficulties that Victorian farmers faced. In 2005 he took part, in the family boat, in the single-handed transatlantic OSTAR race, and wrote an account of the race’s history and his own slow crossing in The Last Man Across The Atlantic.